PART ONE: APHORISTIC ESSAYS

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THE PHILOSOPHER AS MAN - NOT MACHINE: How often should a philosopher actually allow himself to think, if he is to remain a relatively sane, active, healthy individual, and not degenerate into some kind of impersonal thinking machine? Should he go out of his way to think objectively when there is no apparent necessity for him to do so (as, for example, when he isn't officially working), to drive his thought patterns over the bounds of moderation to such an extent that he defies the urge to variety in life and is eventually consumed, like Nietzsche, by an obsession with thought, becomes saddled, as it were, with a plethora of intellectual superfluities?

Undoubtedly, a man who regards himself as a thinker must think sometimes. But an over-fastidious approach to thinking, an over-obdurate inclination to think at any cost could very soon render him anomalous, foolish, trivial, stolid, boring, and unbalanced - to name just a few things. For whether or not the most thought-obsessed people realize it, there is more to life than thinking, and a need certainly exists in people for adherence to a given physiological situation - as, for example, in refraining from thought when the need to do so is patently obvious.

If, therefore, a so-called thinker is to avoid becoming an intellectual crank, he must respect his periodically natural inclination to thoughtlessness and not endeavour, by contrast, to continue thinking when the energy or requirement to do so is no longer there. Otherwise he may subsequently degenerate, if he doesn't suffer a mental breakdown, into some kind of intellectual freak - in other words, into someone who imagines that he ought to think as much as possible, no matter what the circumstances, in order to remain a philosopher, a man of genius, a cut above the common herd. Philosophy, however, refuses to take such nonsense seriously! For the true philosopher always goes his way as a man, not as a thinking machine.